sphericon

Deliverability and consent ​

sphericon treats staying out of the spam folder, and out of trouble, as part of the product rather than an add-on. This page describes what happens for you and what you set up once.

Sending domains ​

You can only send from a domain you control and have verified. Add the domain in Settings → Sending domains; sphericon generates a DKIM keypair, you publish one TXT record at selector._domainkey, and verification flips the domain on. From then on every message is signed by sphericon itself, whichever transport carries it. Sending from an unverified domain is rejected on all three surfaces: broadcasts, automations and transactional mail.

Who may be mailed ​

There is no "subscribed" status on a contact. Whether a message may reach an address is decided in layers, for each channel and destination:

  1. Suppressed addresses are never mailed. Hard bounces, spam complaints and manual bans end up here and are not cleared automatically.
  2. An address that unsubscribed from everything is never mailed.
  3. An address that unsubscribed from this sending source is never mailed.
  4. If your workspace requires confirmed opt-in, an address that has not confirmed is not mailed.
  5. Otherwise it is sent.

Transactional mail skips layers 2 to 4 but still respects suppression.

Opt-outs are keyed by address rather than by contact, so they survive deleting and re-importing a contact. That is the minimum data kept to honor a refusal.

Unsubscribing ​

Every marketing email carries an unsubscribe link and a one-click List-Unsubscribe header (RFC 8058), which mailbox providers expect from bulk senders. Both opt the person out of the sending source that sent the mail: all broadcasts share one source, and each automation is its own, so leaving one drip leaves the others untouched. "Unsubscribe from everything" is a separate, deliberate action.

Opening the link in a browser only shows a confirmation page. The opt-out happens on submit, so link scanners that visit every URL in an email cannot unsubscribe your readers by accident.

Confirmed opt-in ​

Confirmed opt-in is a workspace policy, off by default. When it is on, an address has to confirm before marketing mail reaches it. The confirmation is recorded as an immutable marketing.confirmed event, which gives you proof of consent and can also trigger a welcome automation.

Bounces and complaints ​

Bounce and complaint notifications from an SES-compatible service over SNS are ingested and written to the suppression list, so you stop mailing an address after it bounces. The workspace also tracks bounce and complaint rates per sending domain; read them from GET /api/sending-domains/rates.